Adaptability and Change
Adaptability Requires an Empty Cup
3 min readSoumyashree Chatterjee
New joiners tend to be reasonably good at adapting, mostly because they arrive with nothing to unlearn. The harder case is the experienced professional who has built a working method over many years and now needs to set part of it aside to learn something new, whether that's a new system, a new market approach, or a new way of working with a team.
The resistance in that situation rarely looks like refusal. It looks like a lot of reasonable-sounding objections about why the old way still works fine. That's worth naming plainly in a session rather than treating it as a discipline problem, because it usually comes from genuine expertise, not laziness.
A useful frame here is the idea of an empty cup: you can't pour more in until there's room, and making room on purpose is a skill, not something that just happens with enough encouragement. In a workshop setting, this usually means creating a low-stakes moment where an experienced participant tries a genuinely new approach and is allowed to be visibly clumsy at it in front of peers, because that's often the first real evidence that adapting is possible at all.